Larry Wilson: A sign of good times would be having no signs at all

Wayfinding is generally what I look for signs to help me do, though I don't know that we need to point out the obvious. But the city of Pasadena is calling these new tall, good-looking ones wayfinders, so we're stuck with it, I suppose to differentiate them from the ones that tell you what not to do. Because they are nicely designed, with decent typography and graphics, they don't add to the visual pollution around town, except for the very fact that they exist.

Because all signage is clutter. And since our eyes are already seeing too much information, every new sign takes away from the efficacy of every old sign. So I propose a new rule based on the fine idea that for every new law passed another one should be scrapped. For every new sign raised, another one should be taken down. And since Mayor Bill Bogaard said in opening remarks at Tuesday's annual meeting of the Playhouse District Association that 378 wayfinding signs are going up, we know how many to remove. I have a good nomination for the first one to go down: In front of the Courtyard Marriott on Fair Oaks, there is a huge orange sign noting that traffic fines are doubled in construction zones. There is no construction in sight. The sign is faded from the sun. But still it stays up.

Later in the Playhouse program, architect and urbanist Stefanos Polyzoides mentioned German planner friends who tell him the best way to calm traffic in a downtown is to simply remove every single sign, daunting though that task may be. Oddly enough, in their confusion, drivers slow down, and get extremely polite.

Food for thought, sign erectors. Then all we'll need is our wayfinders.

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For those wondering how the new film "Pasadena," profiled in our features pages, can be called that, when David Ebershoff has already published a wonderful novel called "Pasadena," and Mike White already created and directed a sadly cut-short, hilarious TV series called "Pasadena," the answer is that you can't copyright a title. I used to believe it was titles of six words and under that you couldn't register, but I stand corrected. So you could not only publish a novel titled "Ulysses "; you could call it whatever you like. I do think it's funny that the movie was to have been called "Chinese Checkers" and have been set on the coast of Maine, but that logistics made shooting in the Southland necessary. And so the filmmakers rightly figured the closest they could get to New England in Southern California was right here in Pasadonuts. I wish we could have a seashore and the subsequent clams to bake. But there are certain neighborhoods in which the Nantucket-red Bermuda shorts and the Adirondack chairs are already endemic enough ... In his huge, ambitious, sold-out "Planetarium" performance at Disney Hall on Tuesday night, Sufjan Stevens performed a song for every planet in the solar system, tossing in the moon and the sun for good measure. And he weighed in from the stage on why he indeed included a haunting number about far Pluto, seeing as how Caltech astronomer Mike Brown has killed it from the index of official planets. "A dwarf planet is still a planet," Stevens mused. "Otherwise, they wouldn't use the word 'planet.'" So there you go. Another vexing problem solved.